Re: NATLANG: Colours

On Tuesday, April 20, 2004, at 07:42 AM, Joe wrote:
[snip]
> There are much more everyday ones that do this to a limited extent.
> Welsh, for instance, has one word for blue, green, and grey - 'glas'.
Except for the small point that Welsh has 'gwyrdd' = "green" and also 'ir'
  = "green"  :)

Actually the usual word for green is 'gwyrdd' (cognate with the Romance
words for "green"). The more common meaning of 'glas' is blue, including
blue-grey. But traditionally grass is described as 'glas' rather than
'gwyrdd'.

'ir' has the idea of freshness as well as greenness.

Also, the normal Welsh word for "grey/gray" is 'llwyd'. At one time it
also meant "brown', but that is now normally 'brown' /br@wn/.

In fact it's well known that different languages & cultures mark the
arbitrary boundaries between colors in different places.

But this has nothing to do with the so-called 'universals' of color-naming.
  I don't recall them off-hand but I seem to remember they're along the
lines of: if a language has only two color-words, it will distinguish this
group & that group; if it has three it will distinguish X, Y, X; if it has
4, it will distinguish W, X, Y, z..etc.

I don't remember the details; but I'm certain that both English & Welsh
conform to the 'universals'. I'm a wee bit skeptical of most of these
soo-called 'universals', as Mark Line said:
"I gather that the empirical foundation for these so-called universals has
become pretty shaky lately;
it's also possible that the whole concept of color naming universals is
empirically vacuous due to the lack of effective assessment techniques."

Certainly if some PNG languages break them, I'd not be surprised.

BTW, I write 'color' because if that was good enough for the Romans, it's
good enough for me ;)
Besides, it's one letter less that 'colour' which is no closer a mapping
to the actual sound then the shorter 'color' is.

Ray
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